Second Round for Nvidia Quad SLI: Technology Matured?. Page 8

You may remember that our early tests of a quad-GPU configuration using Nvidia’s quad SLI technology exposed a number of deficiencies of that idea. We’re going to give quad SLI a second try today to see if it has matured enough to be truly useful.

Performance in First-Person 3D Shooters

Battlefield 2

This game not supporting extreme full-screen antialiasing modes, we had to limit our tests to the regular 4x FSAA plus 16x AF mode.

The first of our benchmarks shows that quad-SLI technology still needs improvements: it is slower than the single GeForce 7950 GX2. We can’t pinpoint the reason for that, but it is most likely the driver’s fault.

Meanwhile, the Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire platform works without problems, providing a 30% performance boost over the single Radeon X1950 XTX card.

Call of Duty 2

It’s the same as in the previous test: the efficiency of the CrossFire system is approaching the theoretical maximum whereas the GeForce 7950 quad-SLI, on the contrary, has a zero speed gain.

We should acknowledge that the CrossFire tandem isn’t far faster than the single GeForce 7950 GX2. One might wonder where is the promised might of the Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire for $900 and what is the worth of the GeForce 7950 quad-SLI that costs over $1100?

The quad-SLI platform shows itself well in 8x SLI AA mode since it has four GPUs against the Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire’s two. The speed is not high enough in resolutions above 1280x1024, but you can use 8x SLI AA.

The CrossFire platform regains the first place in the extreme mode because 16x SLI AA mode on the quad-SLI system seems to be very resource-consuming. ATI’s solution can yield only 45fps on average in its Super AA 14x mode, though. This is below the comfortable level for a first-person shooter.